NCAA Buzzer-Beater

Villanova’s buzzer-beater victory for the NCAA national basketball championship was amazing—the ultimate storybook ending.  But you know what else was amazing?  The fan reactions.  All kinds of highlight videos are making the rounds on social media, and they focus as much on the fans as on the players—fans going crazy!

What causes grown men (and some of them definitely not young men) to jump up on the couch and shriek and run through the house and flop on the floor?  What was it that launches a big man like Charles Barkley out of his commentator chair to jump up and down like a kid?  What generated that passion, that hope, and that release of pent-up zeal and longing that produced such explosive ecstasy?

What was it that sent the capacity student crowd watching the game on the big screen at the Villanova Pavilion to erupt in an arm-flinging jump-and-scream dance with decibels off the chart in that very last second of the game?  Was it Jay Wright’s brilliant coaching, or the Wildcats’ text­book teamwork, or the athletic poise and dazzling talent of Ryan Arcidiacono to run the perfect play or Kris Jenkins to make the shot of a lifetime?  Well, yes, all of that … and yet, no.

The exhibit of greatness was impressive, to say the least.  But the need, that desperate yearning to see and exalt and bask in the pres­ence of greatness—this is a deep built-in drive of every human heart.  We were made to worship; we crave the joy of praising true glory.

Basketball and art and music and science and all kinds of human pursuits create a platform to applaud greatness and sample the joy of worship.  The problem comes when we forget the True Glory which all superheroes actually, ultimately reflect.  Every Michael Jordan and Tom Brady and Taylor Swift and NCAA champ and Nobel Prize winner and great singer and dancer and painter (etc.) is made in the image of the Great One and is designed to give Him praise.

We do well to learn from the angel in Revelation 19:10 and 22:9 who says, “Don’t worship me!  Worship God.”  Don’t exchange the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man (Romans 1:23).  Your heart was made to praise the Creator, not the creature!